Jim Cornette Champions AEW Rookie: "I Love This F*cking Kid"
Strong, strong praise for one of AEW's most promising young stars.
Jim Cornette is a huge fan of AEW's Hook.
The divisive wrestling personality revealed as much during a recent episode of his Jim Cornette's Drive Thru podcast, on which he put over Hook's physique, attitude, style, and most importantly, his hair.
Commenting on Hook's first wrestling match, when he faced Fuego Del Sol on AEW Rampage's 10 December episode, Cornette praised the match's set-up, including Hook playing the silent man for over a full year on AEW television before springing into action (h/t WrestleTalk):-
“This hair is gonna be the most over hair in the wrestling business. I think people have called it unfortunate in the past, an unfortunate head of hair, or just weird or whatever, but the hair fits him perfectly. His opponent was (Fuego Del Sol), the luchador from Mobile, Alabama. So obviously they wanted somebody that’s athletic enough to do (Hook’s) s**t but at the same time small enough that (Hook) could move him around and whatever. But the spotlight was on Hook here. And I love this f**king kid. Before we have not seen him do enough to know whether he could do anything or not, and it kind of is the rib – ‘There’s Hook standing there doing nothing’."
Cornette continued, expressing his belief that Hook possesses qualities that can't be taught:-
“But f**k, he’s in great shape, but more importantly, he’s got attitude, the facial expressions, and the way he comes off when he’s heeling the people, and he was heelish in his demeanour. He’s got some natural things – I know Taz has been training him and he’s been training with I’m sure a bunch of different people – but he’s got s**t you can’t really teach if his personality was a bag of wet f**king lettuce. And he just carried himself really good, especially when he knew he was getting over and he knew he was doing well, he got a little extra hitch in his getalong there. He does the Judo throws, he’s smooth with it, he’s got a different kind of style than everybody else. And a lot of it is his aggression – even though he’s green, he was aggressive and he wasn’t out there scared to say boo to a goose as Adrian Street would say."
Here's what Jim had to say as far as potential areas of improvement go:-
“He needs work on those crossfaces, because as he stood over the guy and started crossfacing him, I think… one or two of them missed, the reason why may have been because the other two were live rounds. But it didn’t look smooth, I don’t know, but he needs a little work on that."
Introduced to AEW programming through his father Taz's brief rivalry with Cody Rhodes in 2020, Hook ran through Fuego Del Sol in his AEW debut on 10 December. His next match takes place on this week's Rampage, with Bear Bronson serving as his opponent, as AEW continues the process of building Hook's record.
The 22-year-old developed a substantial cult following during his time as Team Taz's non-wrestling, silent man. This was evident in his strong crowd reactions during the Fuego match - and it'll be interesting to see how these sustain.